Most early (kindergarten through third grades) and remedial instruction programs for reading are characterized by a systematic presentation of word attack skills designed to allow the student to “crack the reading code.” Students are encouraged to sound and blend phonemes to identify words they do not instantly recognize. This approach is not effective for significant numbers of students. The U.S. Department of Labor says that 40% of employed adults do not read well enough to comfortably perform the reading tasks demanded by their current jobs. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, 1996 reports that 40% of fourth graders were reading below fourth grade level. The National Research Council (1998) states, “A person who is not at least a modestly skilled reader by the end of third grade is quite unlikely to graduate from high school.” These statistics support the view that current methodologies are not able to consistently eliminate reading problems. In fact, the field of reading has not been able to satisfactorily define a reading problem. For example, scores on tests have become the primary vehicle for the definition: if you are in eighth grade, and you score at the sixth grade level on a reading test, you have a reading problem. And of course, students with severe reading problems can be identified functionally—they can't read well enough to know what the author is communicating. Both of these methods of identifying a reading problem are less than satisfactory because they say nothing about cause.
Another prior method of teaching reading, developed by the inventors (hereinafter “the prior method”), also had limitations.
The prior method consisted of The Taping Procedure in which the student read a page of an assigned book while following along with a tape and then read it silently. This was repeated until the student could read the page fluently, and then he/she worked on the next page. When the assigned number of pages was completed, the student read them aloud to the teacher. If the oral reading was not laborious, the student was assigned additional pages, and the process was repeated. The limitations associated with the Taping Procedure were as follows: The students were not held accountable to an identifiable standard, and so there was wide deviation in what passed for fluent reading in the judgment of various teachers. There was a pattern in which the pages worked on first were the least fluent during oral reading. Teachers didn't know what to do if the Taping Procedure did not yield the desired result of fluent reading. There were frequently problems in the text that prevented the students from reading fluently, and the prior method did not give direction in what to do in that case. The student was not given assistance or support beyond the Taping Procedure to achieve the indefinite goal of more fluent reading, thus the method was not responsive to differences among students. Students with severe reading problems (those placed in first through third grade materials) were frequently unsuccessful.
The prior method also had a Feedback component in which the student read orally from unfamiliar text while the teacher provided feedback based on errors that emerged in the student's reading. The feedback was designed to encourage students to utilize their knowledge of the world and of language to figure out the words. The limitations associated with the Feedback component were as follows: Often times readers would not commit errors during oral reading of unfamiliar text, but their reading was clearly laborious, and there was no feedback protocol for that situation. The feedback of the prior method was designed to help students expand their strategies for figuring out the words, and for many students this type of feedback had little effect on performance. The feedback protocols were global, and implementing them required deductive thinking on the part of the teacher, which was very difficult—sometimes impossible—to train.
The students in the prior method were also asked to do Silent Reading alone during the reading session with a teacher on a daily basis. The Silent Reading component thus took up what could otherwise be valuable instruction time.
Furthermore, the prior method did not prescribe how multiple students could be instructed, and it did not provide a systematic mechanism for identifying and solving implementation problems. It was often difficult to get the student cognitively engaged in the process. The prior method did not provide criteria for knowing when to advance a student to more complex text, and it did not define a procedure for graduating a student from the program.
A need exists for a method that overcomes all the limitations associated with the prior method and other pre-existing methods.